


Spun Glass and Straw

by elithewho



Category: Snow White: A Tale of Terror (1997)
Genre: F/M, Huddling For Warmth, Nightmares, Post-Canon, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-28
Updated: 2018-10-28
Packaged: 2019-08-09 02:24:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16441217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elithewho/pseuds/elithewho
Summary: He knew she was no delicate rosebud, in danger of being crushed by the slightest touch.





	Spun Glass and Straw

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Morgan for the beta :3 <3

In the aftermath of Lady Claudia’s death, Lord Hoffman had provided a room for him. It was far more luxurious than any he'd ever slept in with a real bed instead of a pallet on the floor, even a window. It was a kindness; he was not obliged to provide anything at all for Will, except perhaps a horse to see him on his way. But once the smoke cleared it became clear that the castle needed anyone who would stay to look after its upkeep. 

The servants who had recovered from Lady Claudia's enchantment had mostly left, unable to recover spiritually from the ordeal. As for attracting a new set of staff, an evil reputation hung over the household like a bad smell, keeping many job-seekers away. 

Lilliana took over as lady of the castle while Lord Hoffman recovered. She took to the position with a confidence that seemed to bemuse her father, but Will had seen that spark in her as she walked boldly into the castle to confront her stepmother. He knew she was no delicate rosebud, in danger of being crushed by the slightest touch. 

To her, he was just a servant. Or so he told himself. She would visit him every day, talk and laugh with him like he was an old friend. At least she was laughing, Will still felt like he wasn’t human enough to laugh anymore. But the sparkle in her eyes, the glow in her cheeks as she smiled, made him feel very much like a man again. 

In public, she was more subdued. Her betrothed was dead after all; he stood off to the side at Peter’s funeral, watching her white face framed in black, recalling how it had appeared at the bottom of her grave. He still felt shaken, unmoored by his belief that she had died. Her cold skin, stiff limbs, blank eyes. It had not been the first time he’d held a dead woman in his arms. 

She played the regal lady for the people, but with him she smiled. She laughed. She touched his arm fondly. It put him on edge more than anything. 

She came to see him while he was mucking around in the stables, hands filthy, brow caked in sweat despite the cold air. She wore a pristine cloak, the glittering hem of her dress threatening to drag in the dirt and scum at her feet. 

“You’ll get yourself dirty, princess,” he warned, unable to keep the growl from his voice. 

Lilli only laughed. “I don’t mind. I have other dresses.” 

Will only frowned. He thought about their kiss. It had felt like a dream. A dream with no place in this castle, her noble father’s house. He was nothing to her. 

The letter from Lord Wolfgang came in late winter, inviting Lilli to visit when the weather had improved. The beginnings of spring were in the air and much of the snow and frost had receded. But Lord Hoffman was far too busy to accompany her. 

“Will would be the perfect companion,” she told her father eagerly, and he couldn’t protest. Only accept the offer gladly. A part of him knew that she could likely take the journey alone without a single incident. She had killed an evil witch on her own, after all. Will had been there for her, intent on helping, but she hardly needed him then at all. But he couldn’t deny her bright smile, entreating him. He wasn’t going to argue against it, but he did feel they should take a carriage. It would be safer, if slower, but Lilli thought only travelling by horse would be enough. Lord Wolfgang’s castle was several days away and it would take almost a week by carriage. 

The weather remained fair for the first few days of their journey, but, as later winter weather often did, it turned on them. They were in the middle of a dense forest, unfamiliar to Will, a half day’s journey from a small village. 

The snow started falling thick and fast almost as soon as night fell. Will glared up at the sky with resentment, as though it had personally wronged him. Lilli pulled her horse up short beside him, her pale face glowing in the gloom. 

“We’ll never make it if the ground is covered,” she muttered and Will frowned. Getting lost in the woods would doom them for sure. They’d have to turn around, head for the village behind them. 

The forest was silent around them as they went. He could tell the horses were nervous, tense, as the snow gathered under their hooves. There was an oppressive quality to the silence, like the weight of so much earth above him. Will grit his teeth, castigating his past self for allowing this to happen. They should have taken a carriage. He shouldn’t have allowed Lilli to convince him not to. 

He could hear the snow falling. It was like faintest fire crackle. In the near perfect darkness, Lilli was pale as the snowdrifts, her skin blue and bloodless. He felt ill. 

But before them, the lights of the village they had passed earlier emerged. He should have felt relieved, but he wouldn’t be until they were inside and warm. He located the inn, hands already shaking from the cold as he dismounted. In the warm glow of lamplight, Lilli’s face glowed with a stricken whiteness and he touched her shoulder on instinct. She was shivering worse than he was, and he urged her inside after shouldering both their packs. 

Only Lilli’s gold coins got them a room at all. The innkeeper at first told them they were full, the bad weather forcing many travellers to stop and rest. Will could feel the man's eyes rake over him with disgust, taking in the scar on his face, the hard look he knew he had about his person. Without Lilli beside him, looking like a princess in her fine cloak, the gold tinkling in her purse, he would have been sleeping outside in the barn with the other animals. 

And there was only one room to be had at all. One room with one bed. 

“I’ll light a fire,” Lilli said, voice still quavering. 

She fished out a flint from her saddlebag and knelt before the cold hearth. Her hands shook and Will watched her struggle for only a moment before taking the stone from her cold fingers. 

“Let me, princess,” he muttered and maybe the sting of the innkeeper’s judgement remained with him, because his voice sounded surly even to his own ears. 

Lilli gave him a look as if offended by his tone and he immediately felt ashamed. But he said nothing else, lighting the fire and filling the room with meager warmth. 

“I’ll sleep on the floor,” he said, avoiding her eye and the squashy bed alike. 

“Don’t be silly,” was her reply, hand brushing his arm. 

He shrugged it off. “I’ve spent enough time sleeping rough,” he said. “Take the bed, you’re shivering.” 

Lilli’s lips had gone thin, but she didn’t argue further. Maybe she read something into his furrowed brow, his stubborn frown. 

But even in front of the hearth, draped in his cloak, Will was freezing. The heat of the fire bathed half his body in heat but the parts pressed onto the cold floor remained icy cold. He could hear Lilli moving around on the bed beside him, her soft sighs like the gusts of wind that had picked up outside. Against his will, he recalled those nights spent in the church while Lilli had slept nearby. There had been no such thing as peace and quiet among the other miners and he hadn’t felt her presence at all. He had kept himself so carefully asway form her since then. 

Even more unbidden were the memories of his wife. He hadn’t spent a single night alone with a woman since Grete. She had been a restless sleeper too, often waking him up in the dead of night as she tossed and turned, elbowing him in the ribs, kicking him in the shin. So many nights he’d spent being irritated at her, wishing she could just sleep peacefully for once. For every night he spent since losing her, he longed to feel her shaking the whole bed with a jolt just as he dozed off, to feel her warm breath on his neck as she snuggled close, trying to get comfortable. 

Will had gotten soft, sleeping in that nice bed provided for him by Lord Hoffman, but the years he’d spent sleeping on the hard earth were still with him and he managed to drift off, hands and feet still dreadfully cold. But the thoughts of Grete that often visited him as he fought for sleep had planted a terrible seed, bursting forth from the fertility of his dreams. Fire, the awful heat of it. Grete’s face as she struggled against the crusaders’ cruel hands, flushed red with pain, and flames leaping off the bodies of their children. Klara and Liesel, so small, so fragile-looking. Like dolls, as they burned. 

He woke shaking, skin tight as though it had just felt the lick of hot iron as they branded him. It took several seconds for him to realize that Lilli was leaning over him, hand on his shoulder. 

“Will,” she was saying, her voice soft. “You’re having a nightmare.” 

He grabbed for her hand, meaning to push her away perhaps, let him wallow in his pain in peace, but instead he held it firmly. 

“It’s terribly cold on the floor, come on the bed,” she said, tone gentle like she was talking to a spooked horse. 

Will shook his head wildly, but he grunted in pain as he shifted, awakening the ache in his hip from being pressed against the hard floor. Lilli continued to pull on his shoulder and Will allowed himself to stand, slowly and still shivering, and collapsed on the lumpy bed. It was still warm from her sleeping body. 

Lilli crawled in beside him, pulling boots off before wrapping the quilt around them both. It was the lingering confusion of the dream that allowed him to lie there, not protesting. 

“I have nightmares too,” she said in a whisper, close enough for him to feel the warmth of her breath on his neck. If she was shivering now, it wasn’t from cold. 

The bed was large enough for both of them, but small enough that Lilli lay very close beside him. She’d removed her travelling cloak and warmth seemed to seep out of her like a stone that had laid in the sun. He thought about snow drifts and pale skin and she look like that now, her cheeks flushed, dark hair gilded with firelight. 

He’d allowed her to kiss him once before, his whole body charged with the feeling of it, and he could have sworn he could feel her skin tingling. He could taste the rainwater still, like melted snow. She leaned in close again and he was too weak to resist. His hand sunk into her hair as if of its own accord, enjoying the feel of her mouth on his. 

Will felt a wild abandon in her arms. The rest of the world didn’t matter; she wasn’t Lilliana Hoffman, he wasn’t a vagabond, an itinerant miner with no fixed home. She was just Lilli and she wanted to kiss him. He hadn’t meant to let her get close to him before. Long ago, with Grete’s burnt body in his arms, he’d vowed to never hold another woman again. But his loneliness, Lilli’s gentle hands, had broken that spell for long enough for him to give in. And he’d felt the pull even when she lay cold and dead in her grave. Even when she rode off with Peter back to her father’s castle. She’d settled into his bones. 

The heat between them grew. He felt her hands, slim and soft, crawl up under his shirt. Lady’s hands, untouched by work. He grabbed one, pulled it away from his burning skin and kissed it. 

“What do you want, princess?” he growled and her eyes sparkled in the dim light. 

“Don’t you know?” she muttered, pushing closer. 

Will squeezed his eyes shut, desire blossoming hot and sudden in his groin. He brushed the hair off her cheek, flushed pink and hot to the touch. She was trying to be coy, grown up and womanly. He had been the same way at sixteen, desperate to be a little man and leave his childhood behind. 

“Princess...” he mumbled against her mouth and it sounded more like an endearment than ever. 

“Hush,” she breathed back, hands drifting back down to pull up his shirt. 

She’d already seen his scars. She’d already touched them. Still, he felt young again, nervous and fumbling on his wedding night. She was bolder than Grete had ever been, a woman so shy even after two babies that he never saw her naked except in the darkness of night. It caught him off guard, the sureness in Lilli’s touch, like it had in the abandoned church. 

But she was still a maiden, he couldn’t forget that. Didn’t when his hands pulled at her laces and he felt her sharp intake of breath, the sudden stiffening of her body. He stopped, breathing hard, desperate to adjust the maddening tightness in his trousers, but her comfort was more important. 

“Tell me to stop,” he muttered, even as she shook her head. “If you want me to stop, say it.” 

He felt her relax, deliberately perhaps, her own hands joining his to pull open her laces and release her stays, tug up her shift underneath. She wasn’t anything like fresh snow under there, rosy and flushed and warm as a fire on a cold night. She nearly burned his hands. 

“I wanted this every time you looked at me,” she breathed, her nails dragging across his skin. 

He thought of every time he looked at her. Even at Peter’s funeral, with her father present, with dozens of people surrounding them. He buried his face in her neck. 

His wedding night at been different. He’d been so ignorant, so clumsy, Grete had gritted her teeth and cried a little at the pain. Afterward he’d held her and stroked her hair and the pain had been forgotten. But he wasn’t a green boy anymore; he didn’t want the same for Lilli. 

The first touch of his hand made her inhale sharply and he swallowed the sound with a kiss. She was warm, damp as morning and soon her surprised gasps turned to faint moans and her face flushed pinker, strands of dark hair stuck to her skin. 

By the time he was fully undressed and poised between her thighs, he was shaking. Nerves, his pent-up desire, the intensity of her hands on his skin. She touched his shoulder blades, sliding over the raised, gnarled skin of old scars, then across his damp brow and the cross burned into his face. He shuddered despite himself, the skin still tight and sensitive. Especially now. 

There was no blood when he pushed into her, none of that bride’s price that was supposed to signal a good bedding. After his wedding night, Grete’s sisters had stripped off the blood-stained sheet to show it as proof of a good match and Grete had been so embarrassed she hid inside for days. Will had been furious, shouting and making a fool of himself while they giggled and teased. 

He wished he could stop thinking about these things while with Lilli. His mind held a treacherous creature with sharp claws and hungry jaws, always hungry to drag him into the past. But he need only look into Lilli’s eyes to forget for a time. Long enough to kiss her and feel her warm and soft around him, her heartbeat a fierce rhythm against his, only a half-step out of time. 

Afterward, he lay his head on her chest, listening to that heartbeat. How close it had come to stopping altogether. Her fingers scraped his scalp, cupped the back of his neck, rubbed a circle into his shoulder. Nothing could have prepared him for the void of emptiness he’d fallen into when he lost Grete, Klara and Liesel. But so much time spent in the abyss had made him forget how it felt to have... this. 

Will lifted his head and kissed her. He wished he had been kissing her all along.


End file.
